Zarif's Book, Part VII: Religious Tensions in the Negotiating Room

In his last weeks in office, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who served as foreign minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran from 2013 to 2021, published a six-volume treatise on Iran’s nuclear negotiations with the P5 + 1:  the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany.

Entitled The Sealed Secret, the book carries the subtitle “An Immense Endeavor for Iran’s Rights, Security and Development”. Besides Zarif’s own memoirs, the book also includes contributions and quotations from Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency during the pre-JCPOA nuclear talks, former deputy foreign minister Abbas Araghchi and Majid Takht-Ravanchi, a senior nuclear negotiator and Iran’s permanent representative to the UN.

Our seventh article relates the story of Zarif’s theatrics, as described in the book, to prove his religious credentials – and on Khamenei’s fatwa prohibiting the production, stockpiling and using of nuclear weapons, which Iranian nuclear negotiators repeatedly used to try to assure the world of the Islamic Republic’s benign intentions.

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In several of his speeches since 2000, Ayatollah Khamenei has asserted that producing, stockpiling and using nuclear weapons is haram: forbidden in Islam. The government of the Islamic Republic has interpreted this implicit prohibition a “fatwa”, and this brought it up in negotiations over the JCPOA.

During early talks with the foreign ministers of the P5+1, Javad Zarif and his colleagues cited this so-called “fatwa” as a guarantee that Iran’s nuclear program would remain peaceful. But world powers were understandably doubtful and so asked for Iranian MPs to also enshrine it in law.

This didn’t sit well with the Iranian team. They insisted Khamenei’s comments constituted a “religious edict”: higher than the law of the land. This was the pretext on which no legislation barring production of nuclear weapons was ever passed in Iran.

During Hassan Rouhani’s presidency, US Secretary of State John Kerry called reports of Khamenei’s fatwa “valid” on a few occasions. But several interesting stories in The Sealed Secret relates how, during the talks, Zarif and his foreign counterparts differed in their stance on religion and the role it might play in the talks.

God in the Negotiations Room

One passage in the book describes how, during nuclear negotiations hosted by Oman, Zarif made an extravagant gesture in a bid to impress his hosts, make news in Arab countries and snub world powers.

“When the time for prayers came during a tripartite session with Ms. Ashton and Mr. Kerry,” the book relates, “the Foreign Minister of the Islamic Republic asked his Omani host for a prayer mat so that he could pray. Naturally, the Omani officials ordered for a mat to be prepared and taken into the negotiating room. This was the first time Dr. Zarif, relaxed and in front of the astonished eyes of Ms. Ashton and Mr. Kerry, performed the rites [in front of them]... Ms. Ashton and Mr. Kerry sat quietly and watched in silence as the Foreign Minister of the Islamic Republic carried out his duties. When the prayer was done, Dr. Zarif turned to Ms. Ashton and Mr. Kerry, and said: ‘I prayed in this very room, both to remind myself and to make you two realize, that you are not masters of the world.”

It wasn’t the last time either. In a later session in Vienna, Zarif again decided to pray inside the negotiating chamber. “This time around,” The Sealed Secret reports, “Dr. Zarif got into a debate about religious beliefs with Ms. Ashton and Mr. Kerry. It was interesting that in this debate Mr. Kerry was in Dr. Zarif’s corner, and both of them talked about God and spirituality to Ms. Ashton, who considered herself an atheist.”

With such a background, then, the American delegation was taking Khamenei’s fatwa more seriously than the European, Chines and Russian delegations but the Americans still wanted the fatwa to be guaranteed by law.

Kerry’s “Great Respect” for Khamenei’s Fatwa

In March 2014, while nuclear negotiations were ongoing, John Kerry himself said: “I have great respect for a fatwa. A fatwa is a very highly regarded message of religious importance. And when any fatwa is issued, I think people take it seriously, and so do we, even though it's not our practice. But we have great respect for what it means.”

Then, however, he added: “But the trick here – the trick, the art, the requirement here — is to translate the fatwa into a legally binding, globally recognized, international understanding. And so I hope that's achievable... President Obama and I both are extremely welcoming and grateful for the fact that the Supreme Leader has issued a fatwa... But now we need to take that and put it into a sort of understandable legal structure, if you will, that goes beyond an article of faith into a more secular process that everybody can attach a meaning to.”

But unlike Obama’s administration, other negotiating parties did not share this attitude towards Khamenei’s fatwa. According to The Sealed Secret, the French and the British were more blunt about it. In one of the very first rounds of talks between deputy foreign ministers, the book relates: “The head of the British negotiating team said, ‘We are committed to advancing the negotiations to find a comprehensive solution. We want Iran to have an entirely peaceful program but, at the same time, we’re concerned about Iran’s military nuclear power in case it leaves the NPT [the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons], not under the current administration and Supreme Leader but in the long term.”

According to the book, the speaker was Sir Simon Gass, a former British ambassador. In essence, he was expressing concern about the future of Iran’s nuclear program and Khamenei’s fatwa after his death. This indicates that British diplomats had a deeper understanding of the Shia belief system and the political attitudes of Islamic Republic officials.

A Fatwa Dies with Whoever Issued It

According to Shia tradition, it is not permitted to keep following a religious authority after his death. In other words, even if the Islamic Republic remains faithful to Khamenei’s ban on making, stockpiling and using nuclear weapons in his own lifetime, no-one is obliged to honor the “fatwa” after he dies. Even now, while he remains alive, it is not obligatory for those who do not regard him as a religious authority.

In February 2021 Mahmoud Alavi, Rouhani’s Minister of Intelligence, implied that the fatwa could be overturned. “Our nuclear industry is peaceful,” he said. “The fatwa of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution has declared nuclear weapons are forbidden. But if they push the Islamic Republic of Iran in that direction, it would no longer be Iran's fault; rather, it would be the fault of those who have terrorized Iran.”

Despite the misgivings, President Barack Obama is understood to have at least partially trusted the fatwa as a basis for reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran. The Sealed Secret quotes Zarif as having told John Kerry: “We know how much the Supreme Leader distrusts America. Since the time of [Ahmadinejad’s foreign minister Ali Akbar] Salehi, we have tried to build up the Supreme Leader’s trust [in the USA].”

Khamenei first announced that nuclear weapons were forbidden in 2003, when the nuclear crisis had just begun. He repeated it in 2010 while negotiations were at a sensitive and more complicated stage, with Obama involved. The two heads of state had begun a correspondence a few months earlier.

The 1000-Year-Old Fatwa

A year after serious efforts to reach a comprehensive agreement to lift all nuclear sanctions on Iran got under way, Zarif, for the first and the last time, talked about the possibility of turning the fatwa into law.

Late in the spring of 2015, as he was on a plane to Vienna to start the fifth round of talks, he told reporters: “At this moment we are studying the writings of a range of religious authorities about the ban on weapons of mass destruction... These writings show that the jurisprudential foundations for the fatwa by the Exalted Supreme Leader go back a thousand years, and to a fatwa by Sheikh Tusi” – a prominent Persian scholar of Shia Islamic jurisprudence (995-1067AD).

Some hours later, most likely after he had arrived in Vienna, Zarif also tweeted a link to an article entitled The Religious Foundations of the Edicts by Shi’ite Jurists Prohibiting Weapons of Mass Destruction. But then he never mentioned it publicly again, suggesting the wider Islamic Republic did not agree with the proposal.

Instead, in the final text of the nuclear agreement, the Islamic Republic made the commitment not to attempt to make nuclear weapons in the future. But when President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the JCPOA and reimposed sanctions, at least one senior official of Rouhani’s government – to whit, Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi – questioned the validity of the religious ban on nuclear weapons and Iran’s commitment to avoid them.

P5+1 Warned About Consequences of US Withdrawal

Iran’s reaction to the reimposition of sanctions might have been news to the public, but it was no surprise to representatives of the P5+1 countries. As The Sealed Secret reveals for the first time, in a letter on  May 8, 2019, President Rouhani told leaders of the P4+1 countries — Britain, France, China and Russia plus Germany — that if the UN Security Council sanctions Trump wanted to reimpose were somehow enforced again, the Islamic Republic might “take action”. Implying that Khamenei’s nuclear fatwa would be revoked, he said: “If, whatever the excuse, Iran is subjected to a resolution by the Security Council, it will not only end the implementation of the JCPOA completely but will also start the process of [Iran’s] leaving the Non-Proliferation Treaty according to its Article 10, paragraph 1.”

The article Rouhani was referring to states: “Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.”

 

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